Answer

Answer to last week's quiz question:
The composer who was asked [by Alfred Newman] to present the 1938 Oscar for Best Score was Arnold Schoenberg, who did not attend the ceremony but sent a message in which he hoped that 'there will soon come a time, when the severe conditions and laws of modernistic music will be no hindrance any more toward a reconciliation with the necessities of the moving picture industry'.

Searching for Schoenberg

Located it! Brentwood Country Mart on 26th Street, established 1948, where, apparently (according Dorothy Lamb Crawford's book A Windfall of Composers), composer Arnold Schoenberg called out to Marta Feuchtwanger that he did not have syphilis.

Schoenberg was angry that in his recent novel, Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann had ascribed the invention of 12-tone technique to Mann's hero, Adrian Leverkühn, and that Mann had made Leverkühn syphilitic. Feuchtwanger was grateful Schoenberg had called out in German.

Bertolt Brecht's house is a mile down the street. Brecht was no longer in the United States in 1948 (he'd left in 1947) but the fact does illustrate how all these artists lived within coo-ee of each other in Los Angeles.

For my article on the emigre composers in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s, please go to my blog post, A Culture in Exile, April 25 2013.

A daily reminder

LA gets such a bad press. A shop assistant in Van Nuys even said, 'You came from Australia to Van Nuys!!?' And yes, parts are obviously barren - concrete and trashy shops.
But there are beautiful pockets. There is still an orange grove on the university campus at Northridge. We went walking up in the Santa Monica mountains at the end of Reseda Boulevard. You can reach the sea from here. It felt familiar to me as desert, hot, dry and scrubby, and yet, look closely at this picture and you'll see snow-capped mountains in the distance. This is a real buzz for me.

I know people love to knock LA, but out in the suburbs in the San Fernando Valley where we stayed, I would sum it up as 'birdsong, grapefruit and sunshine'. Don't forget that that when someone once couldn't understand how the arch-European intellectual Arnold Schoenberg could live in LA after Vienna, he said, 'I get to play tennis every day.'